“what did students do before chatgpt?”
Is this supposed to be an actual quote? Like, someone said this unironically?
“what did students do before smartphones/tablets?”
“what did students do before laptops?”
“what did students do before the internet?”it’s not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.
Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won’t magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.
Grew up before the internet.
One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.
These days, there’s a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.
‘… and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon.’
Asterix taught me a lot of history too 😁
It was wrong but the vibes were there!
Not only that, but it sparked the interest. I lost count of how many things I saw in cartoons, comics, movies and TV shows that I simply had to know more about.
Another bygone method of learning things was by thumbing through the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia, like Golden Book Encyclopedia.
I have no doubt about it…
Well of course. LLMs have been able to automate so many bullshit assignments for students. I am not talking about the ones where they actually have to learn about a subject that is important to things in life. But the ones where the entire point of the assignment is to write pages.
Education still hasn’t caught up with the many technological advances in the latest years. Some still act like it are the 1950’s.
Did you read the OP? The point is, writing pages of bullshit is how you get better at writing. It’s like saying “Oh yeah I don’t want to do all these bullshit exercises at the gym too build muscle I should just sit at home and let a robot do them for me” the whole point is building the skill not producing the assignment.
Yes I read it, and what I am saying is that modern day users don’t need to be able to write bullshit because of all the advances in technology.
Give purposeful assignment instead. You still get people to write and they learn something as well. 2 birds with 1 stone.
It is like forcing students to come to school using a steam train because they will know how to keep a steam engine working so it makes them better at shoveling.
The ability to construct a logical argument is useful not just for communicating with others, but also for structuring your own thoughts.
It’s also useful for learning. Turns out writing stuff down makes stuff go into your memory better.
I never had a single assignment in college where the only point was to write pages.
Cringe
Yep.
Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.
They’ll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they’ve never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.
We haven’t had LLMs that long. Are people seriously already forgetting the concept of learning skills?
Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.
It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.
Hate to be that guy, but you’re looking for effect here. You’re describing the effect (end result) of a change, not the affect (change) itself.
Haha yes, was typing too quickly.
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In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.
I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.
I know cheating has always been rampant, but I’ve never seen it this bad before.
Are you allowed to fail them? Everything I’ve heard about primary and secondary school in the US is that teachers can no longer punish or fail to pass students who are cheating or failing or have major disciplinary problems. I hope that it’s different after high school.
I was told specifically to give them a second chance at the assignment for 50% credit. No disciplinary action was taken on the part of the administration with the justification that “if they really don’t know the material they’ll fail the final.”
So no, it’s just as bad in higher education here.
The future looks bright.
at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.
lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else’s work I suppose lol
Since computers became common, it’s seemed like an increasing number of people don’t know how to, and don’t think they should have to, learn skills.
we used to do this thing called “learning”.
It’s called git gudding now.
git -f gud
Isn’t that gud gitting?
I dunno the man page lists it as git-gud
I think using ChatGPT for learning is okay, assuming the user is actually interested in learning. If you just want to get something done, you’re absolutely cheating the task at hand, and your future self.
ChatGPT truly shines when you ask it follow-up questions on the thing you want to learn about and really “delve” (hate that AI ass word) into different aspects to internalize them yourself.
The dangerous part is that it makes stuff up and you won’t have the knowledge to tell.
Exactly. I had a colleague who searched for a question about a retail math formula. The LLM returned a result that was close but slightly wrong. She spent two weeks with incorrect numbers for her baseline and as a result her forecasts were all wrong. When reviewing her numbers, everything was just a little wonky so I dug into it and discovered her mistake. She was absolutely dumbfounded the “AI” even could be wrong and tried to argue that I was incorrect. Dug out my old retail math cheat sheet and showed her the correct formula.
I haven’t used LLM’s for anything since. Gotta validate all that shit anyways, so why use it at all?
These things will be fantastic for taking my order at the drive thru and in a few other applications, but if you’re trying to learn from them; don’t.
I was a kid in the era of separate pocket calculators, so I’ve heard so much of this song and dance before. Even with deterministic tools that always work barring user error you need to have enough understanding that you can tell when something is off and to properly frame the problem
But that’s not how they’re selling LLM’s. Even the common name AI is dishonest marketing bull.
Well, yeah, you have to have a brain and actually verify things. It’s like Wikipedia circa 2004.
Except when it lies. Then it is the opposite of what you want it to be.
My nephew wants to be instantly good at things and it drives me crazy. He’ll roll his eyes and say "of course you’re going to make that shot (in billiards) or get frustrated that’s he’s not amazing without practicing in martial arts, video games, golf, fitness, etc. I’m sure he’ll grow out of it, but in the meantime he won’t work at it or accept instruction. I’m like “yeah dude, I’ve done this thousands of times. Let me help you!”
Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don’t like to ever fail at anything.
*teach him to grow from failure
In order to grow from failure one must learn to fail
That first lesson was so hard to learn
I’m his uncle. Of course he’s familiar with failure!
My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he’s smart and most things always came easy to him. He’d do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A’s. But when something comes along that he’s not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn’t come naturally. It’s a decoration on his wall.
I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn’t come naturally, but he’s continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it’s something a person can get past.
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My wife is really smart and says she just “sees” the answer to math problems. Ask her to multiple two 3-digit numbers and she does it quickly in her head. Was never like that for me, I always have to work the process even for simple things, it’s never obvious. I got a CS degree with a math minor, and took some pretty high level math classes. It was always the same for me: learn the process, then work it through, whether it’s number theory or multiplying two numbers.
My wife didn’t get a degree, but she went back to school as an adult. When she got to the first math class that had symbolic/algebraic notation, she ground to a halt initially. She couldn’t just see the answer, and she had no practice working through the process. Was a real slog for her.
Being brilliant is a gift, but you need to learn to work the mental muscles too.
This is basically why I believe that effortless As in grade school are a failure state for kids. People tell me that mu standards are too high for my kid, but I cannot express to them that now is the time for my kid to build up the ability to struggle and persevere. It’s not that I have high standards. I just think that a perfect score is a sign that the task wasn’t hard enough.
I saw way too many kids burn out in college because they’d never seem a grade below an A before, let alone the C they just scored. Since I was used to being pushed to my limit in grade school (not by my mother, but by teachers), I was fully prepared to work hard to barely make a B sometimes.
I was the kind of kid to get good grades without really trying, and I think I would have been better off if I had been challenged. Instead I just coasted, and when I got to calc2 I failed. I still don’t have great learning habits.
Hmm, mixed emotions here. On the one hand, I agree that grade school kids are capable of much more than we typically teach them. I remember a 5th grade teacher who taught us math up through fractions, and then not getting anything new in math until like 8th or 9th grade.
On the other hand, I don’t think making it a struggle, with a scale that tells most of them that they didn’t quite measure up, is the way to successfully teach young kids. That 5th grade teacher I mentioned made the class fun, and we weren’t aware that we were leaning stuff at a faster rate than the other classes. It was all very positive.
If my kid thinks that being less than perfect is a personal failing then I have failed as a parent. That’s the point of challenge my kid. To teach her that she doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s a B is okay. Doing your best is okay. Hell, doing what you feel like is okay as long as you hit that minimum standard which is a C.
I don’t intend to make my kid struggle for a B, but As should not be effortless. If my kid isn’t putting in the work then I don’t think they should get an A. I think it’s okay not to have an A. I was always a solid B student even in college and I was and still am okay with that. It made me a chiller kid in college and it gave me space to learn how to expand my capacity because I was so shocked by how “poorly” I did.
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I think learning to be happy with a B is an important skill. I don’t believe that As should be effortless. If an A is effortless, then that means the kid wasn’t in a challenging enough class. In real life the only reward for hard work is more work. Leaning when they want to push for the A and when they want to be content with a B is an important think for them to decide. Perfection should never be the goal. That’s how kids burn out at the college level.
I think the Jungian concept of the Puer Aeternus describes this very well.
I think the difference with his guitar playing and drawing was that he probably just didn’t enjoy learning guitar. Tons of people buy an instrument to only learn later that they didn’t like it as much as they thought. Not trying to say you don’t know your kid, just pointing out that learning an art requires an interest to put into it. It can definitely be frustrating to realize that you aren’t as interested in the learning process of something you had dreams of being good at.
I hear what you’re saying, but I honestly think it was just motivation and maturity. I gave you two examples, but there were a number of things that he got very frustrated about when they didn’t come easily. Some were school subjects, so he didn’t have a choice and had to keep pushing at it, and would eventually get there. In fact, he didn’t learn those things more slowly than anyone else, it was just that he was used to getting things instantly.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that he would enjoy the guitar, but he wasn’t mature enough to get past the initial frustration at the time.
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That’s certainly a possibility.
That’s good to hear, and I’m glad your kid is figuring it out! Very good point about those that are gifted sometimes needing to work harder at learning to, uh, learn.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
Edit, in the same spirit: “The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried.” - No idea who
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“Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.” - Rocky Balboa
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Daniel : Wouldn’t a fly swatter be easier?
Miyagi : Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.
Daniel : Ever catch one?
Miyagi : Not yet.
– Karate Kid
I love the feeling of neurons rewiring to form a new pathway of understanding. Or whatever the hell it is. At 38, it’s a pleasure finding I can still learn and build new skills.
Playing Beat Saber and hitting a plateau only to find my focus starts to evaporate over the course of a hard track as I find that flow, that path to just being in it, each skill plateau merely being temporary, is great. Playing guitar and slowly starting to wire my brain for the pathway for barre chords and faster movement along the frets is a crazy feeling. That sense of finally finding the pathways for singing to operate even SLIGHTLY separately from the rhythm of the guitar, those glimpses of polyrhythm? Addicting.
If you’re able, I hope you can teach him to find that pleasure of not mastery, but evolving strengths. Maybe it’s like an RPG where skills can be leveled up over time the more you use them. I know all too well the frustration of imperfection to start, ADHD during the 90s and the whole “perfect student” pressure created a lot I had to undo and still am, but each time I can break free of that it’s rewarding.
Well said. I will certainly do my best! 🫡
idk man. my ex was like this at 30. she just gave up on stuff if she wasn’t good at it immediately. made it very difficult to do things together
it was kind of weird because in most other aspects she was very mature. but not that one.
I’m 39 and I want to be instantly good at things. It sucks. Good luck breaking your nephew out of it.
Find things that don’t matter as much and work from there.
It’s not snide to say “skills are developed with practise”. You want to de-skill by letting an idiot machine say wrong stuff while you rot? Go ahead.
Can confirm, in college I mostly partied and screwed around, but thanks to years of practice at procrastination I had by then developed the skill of throwing anything together at the last minute. So I could go to the library after dinner the night before a paper was due, find the right shelf, grab a handful of books and write a rough draft of an essay in couple hours. Back in the dorm by 10pm, I would make some edits, type it up (this was in the typewriter era), and turn it in on time for at least a B. But like I said, this was after years of putting off assignments in elementary and high school. Turns out this is an extremely valuable skill in office environments, where due to poor planning there’s frequently some crisis that has to be solved ASAFP. People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars. LPT: if you’re actually doing that and not getting the credit and rewards you deserve, move somewhere else - you’ve valuable.
People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.
I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn’t get any unemployment but at least I didn’t have to pretend to look for work for six months.
I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don’t like being involved in any way with project failures.
We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants.
Did this radicalize you? This would have radicalized me.
I was radicalized in the '80s. Nothing has surprised me since then.
I had a friend in high school who did the hand drawing exercise, it does work. He got really good at drawing hands.
It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.
That did not go where I thought it would.
Boy scouts can lead to the same outcome
Father of the year!
…everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!
That’s honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.
not hard to be better than AI at drawing hands
Also: being able to draw hands is the most important identifier of not being an ai.
Using chatgpt to do your school work is like paying/beating up a nerd to do your work for you. You won’t learn shit, and there is a chance you’ll get in trouble for cheating.
Except, the nerd will probably do the school work correctly.
Not if they are smart enough to know it would be suspicious if the dumb student suddenly started getting 100℅, so they purposely fudge a few answers.
The best thing about being a human is that you can learn anything you want, to accomplish what you need to. Want to create an app, a framework, but don’t know how to code? Guess what, you can learn how to code. Want to write a story or an essay? You can learn how to write. Learning to satiate my curiosity about something; learning something so that I can accomplish something are the best things about my life. That is how I learnt programming. I don’t want anything to replace that for me, especially not some shit-generating LLM.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me. ChatGPT do this triple bypass heat surgery for me.
I’m sure that people will come up with excuses why this is different than cheating on an essay, but the point is that if one can’t study for the basic shit then doing the hard shit is going to be even harder. It’s not flipping a switch and saying “ok now I’ll take it all seriously…”. Then again, someone shirking basic work skills is probably destined for a retail middle manager job and not someone headed for radiology.
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me
How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?
95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here’s why it’s a 95:
Landing Impact (40 points):
- Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
- Left wing occupied as a nesting box
Passenger Experience (35 points):
- Emergency slide covered in yolk
- Free eggs for all
…----
I’m a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.
See, there’s this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they’ll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, “you’ll never know when algebra will save your life” is not good enough. No, “Someday this might come in handy” isn’t good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.
My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don’t remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve “Okay when it’s a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it’s in a journal…”
When teachers answer “Why do we have to learn this” with “it’s required for your diploma” literally don’t learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.
That doesn’t happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there’s a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there’s no such thing as an aircraft that’s safe to fly. I build furniture now.
What were we talking about?
I remember a comic I read at some point long ago, where power had gone out and a bored kid asks his grandma: “what did you do before TVs existed?” and the grandma says: “we would just sit around and wait for TVs to be invented”.
I’m now using that answer everytime I see a “what did you do before ___ was invented?”
I get the point, but often the answer to “what did you do before ___ was invented?” Is “we suffered and died”. Like vaccines for example.
“before tv was invented? Well we went out with other kids, where adults weren’t around, and got into trouble. As we got older we started fucking, and drinking, and getting into more serious trouble.”
I did all that after TV was invented.
Same, also after the internet, and social media. However a lot less people are compared to when I was a child.
Some of those things are pretty double-edged though. I grew up pre-Internet. Today, if a group of friends are standing around and someone says, “I heard that platypus eat bats,” someone will whip out their phone and say that’s bullshit in 30 seconds. Back in the day, we could ride our bikes to the library and find out, or maybe someone’s parents had encyclopedias, but we usually just didn’t care that much. On the other hand, because stuff wasn’t right at our fingertips, we had to reason a lot more things out. I feel like our critical thinking skills were better. Someone was bound to say, “Bats? How would that work? They live in the water and bats fly around eating bugs. I’m not buying it.”
And then there were those who had less good critical thinking skills and believed in lots of let’s say interesting things.
Yep, those folks have always been around. There was a weird thing when email became widespread. It turns out that there are (at least were) people who will reject a stupid thing if someone says it to them, but will believe the same stupid thing if they see it written. A giant number of early viral emails were things like “According to the New York Times, gangs are targeting people who wear people shoes.” Of course, the NYT never said that, it was all bullshit, but all sorts of people would swear it was true because papers were reporting it.
Cocaine
wrong post, ma man
Maybe it was referencing this post (https://sh.itjust.works/post/42574056)
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I think it’s an appropriate response to the title, like in a grammatical sense, it just makes me worry about what kind of students that commenter encountered on a day to day basis
Wait do you mean to tell me that constantly slacking and taking the easy way will make me dumb and lazy?
I may be dumb and lazy, but at least I’m not, wait, what was the third thing?
I mean… Fuck AI and all, but hard way = better is definitely not some universal principal we should be applying to education.
The most famous example is all of the people who grew up when calculators were large and expensive pieces of equipment, who were told “you need to memorize your multiplication tables because you won’t always have a calculator with you”, which sounds absolutely ridiculous to anyone today.
I think it’s important for humanity to ask itself: which cognitive processes should we dedicate our fleshy organic brains to, and which cognitive processes are better off outsourced to external technologies? “AI” as a modern buzzword seems to be trying to positively brand these products that are trying (and usually failing) to take on processes that are best left within the brain.
Did you really not memorize your multiplication tables? Can you do mental math? For me, knowing multiplication tables is a matter of convenience; it takes a few seconds to pull out a calculator and type in the numbers when I’m perfectly able to do it instantly. Even two by one digit multiplication is faster than pulling out a calculator.
It’s important to distinguish between what you memorized as part of a rote process as a child as part of your formal education process versus what you have remember as part of your lifetime of experiences. And if your own personal first exposure to multiplication tables was being made to memorize them, you are probably going to think that’s the only way to do it.
For example, most adults would probably the ones they use the most often memorized without any formal education. People use halves, quarters, doubles, and quadruples all the time, so the brain creates shortcuts for those.
Personally my older sister taught me the principles of multiplication and division a couple of years before I encountered them in elementary school. So I had already started to think of it as like… A nested adding function. And also using the algebraic properties (communicative, distributive, associative… I’m probably forgetting some of their names) helped me to understand the numbers and their relationships. So memorizing that 10x means you move the decimal place, but then extrapolating that so that n x 5 = n x 10/2 , which is often easier. Or that n x 9 = (n x 10) - n. So memorizing not the results, but the process.
So when I got to 2nd grade and they started teaching multiplication tables my experience was different from my peers. They would hand out sheets of multiplication problems for the class to do quietly, and at first I was about average: faster than the kids who weren’t trying, but slower than the ones who had begun to memorize the table. But I was less prone to the errors that other kids would make: mixing up 6’s and 9’s or 1’s and 7’s because they look similar, for example. And I quickly got faster than them, especially when we expanded beyond aingle-digit tables. It also helped me in the process of learning division: when we on from just leaving remainders as an R# to actually writing out decimals or using fractions. My peers would get tripped up trying to divide a number that did not fit nearly into the tables they had memorized. Then they introduced exponents, which a lot of people struggled with but for me was the next logical step to take (although my sister probably showed them to me earlier too).
And even today I totally break out the calculator app or even spreadsheet app on my phone. Not for help with the algebra, but to make a record and make sure that I’m including everything I need to. If I were in the grocery store trying to predict what my end cost will be at checkout, it’s much more likely I would get it wrong from missing an item, missing a promotion, or not knowing enough about sales tax eligibility than from any algebraic mistake.
You make a good point. I’m interested to know how old you are, because the ‘correct’ way to teach math has been debated for 70ish years New math was introduced in the 50’s, and emphasized the understanding of how base-10 works. This is commonly mistaken for common core math,which put even more emphasis on understanding the procedures used for math rather than the right answer. When I grew up, addition was mainly based in new math, whereas multiplication was introduced as successive addition, but was mostly focused on memorizing tables.
I’m in my 30’s. Just barely missed Common Core but I remember hearing parents with younger children complaining about it. I don’t remember the math I was taught having any specific branding with it, though it may have been a late variant of New Math.
What I was taught in schools definitely still had a lot of memorization involved. I consider myself lucky that my sister taught me earlier, because I saw a lot of my bright peers struggle with the way it was taught in schools. I never had to study math outside of school for my entire academic career. She helped me to understand computers (she also taught me binary, octal, and hexadecimal systems. Hexadecimal is very useful for a kid with a GameShark and Pokemon).
I don’t mean to be picking fights with you but this is a topic I care about - I really think it’s a mistake to say “I was exposed to this material much earlier and therefore picked it up faster and more robustly” and then claim that’s an argument against rote memorization. Especially considering how few kids are keeping up in math. Your experience was very fortunate and largely uncommon.
The rules and shortcuts you’re describing are absolutely part of the work I’m doing with my daughter, but they go hand-in-hand with the “spaced repetition” (ish) approach we’re focusing on, of just iterating a lot. One without the other is much weaker - mnemonics are extremely valuable aids, but none of it sticks without repetition. I’d say that all tasks involving remembering lots of minutiae (contrasted with remembering processes) greatly benefit from mnemonics, but fully require rote memorization practice in order to have the dexterity needed for quick recall that doesn’t get in the way. So things like chemistry, anatomy, case law.
It’s true that multiplication can be kept strictly a “learn the process” task, but your other points kind of just say that the repetition that comes in a person’s life later on finishes that work / replaces the dedicated memorization phase. And frankly the process you went through sounds like it involved a standard amount of repetition, you just had a head start so it didn’t feel as new or as uncomfortable.
I say only learning the processes is extremely inefficient and will make learning any more advanced math much, much harder. Lacking that strong basis of recall, kids have to think to do the multiplication that is merely an intermediate step and not at all part of the material being learned, moving forward. This reduces (greatly) their ability to engage with the actual subject matter because they are already working to complete the intermediate steps. I’ve seen it happen firsthand - I think you mean well, but I think your POV on multiplication is way wrong and actually harmful here.
E: I’m conflating mnemonics with arithmetic shortcuts here, I hope you’ll forgive that. They’re related - remembering one arithmetic shortcut gives you access to many answers, and usually mnemonics serve a similar “get lots of stuff for one significant remembered thing” kind of role.
Honestly I think you’re trying to justify your own approach with your child rather than looking at what should happen.
This has been a trend in US education for decades, maybe a century. The days of the old 1-room schoolhouse with a nun who slapped your knuckles for not memorizing your times tables are long past. Another commenter here pointed out to me that, for math in particular, you can see this trend in the New Math and later Common Core.
My same sister who taught me as a child later got a teaching degree, and one of the key parts of that I remember talking with her about was how the overall trend in the industry was to move away from memorization. Especially because they ran into the common issue where students lose good chunks of what they memorized over summer breaks.
Memorization can be effective, but it can also be a crutch. Those same multiplication tables you memorize as a child you then need to find a way to forget if you ever need to work outside of base-10. The cost of the ease and speed of memorizationks flexibility. Sometimes that’s a good trade-off to make, but sometimes it’s not.
Beyond that, memorization is just plain bad. Human memory is bad- anyone in criminal justice can arrest to that. As an accountant I can as well. You may think you still have your multiplication tables memorized. Maybe you still do, maybe you don’t. Maybe you will on a couple decades, maybe not. Depends on who you are and what you do to maintain that database.
I’m also surprised to see you describe learning the process as “inefficient”. To me it seems far more efficient to learn the code or function to do something abstractly and how to apply it than to memorize whole tables of inputs and outputs. I also don’t know follow how you think learning processes is harmful to advanced mathmatics either. There are very, very few advanced mathematical problems where memorization could be useful beyond what is taught in high schools. Like… Maybe Turing’s Halting Problem in earlier iterations? Kids (or adults) don’t have to think to multiply if they just remember the table- that’s part of the problem. So I think you’re the one with the harmful and outdated point of view here.
Well, memorization does have one good advantage. It’s easier to teach. Just hand the student the table and tell them to learn it. Very easy to test and evaluate on.
I’m advocating for a mixed approach that serves more kids, and arguing that you had such a mixed approach yourself but don’t seem to acknowledge it.
Memorization (done properly, that is - I invoked “spaced repetition”, an evidence-based learning technique from the field of education, you’re the one talking about corporal punishment from nuns) is effective in precisely this and related domains having tons of minutiae.
It’s not that learning the process is inefficient, that’s not what I meant - learning only the process and not focusing on rote memorization as well leaves you with only the process to rely on when learning further math (your experience sounds like you got both, regarding multiplication).
Relying on only rules/processes to complete intermediate steps that are not the subject under instruction is what is inefficient. Using rules to reach simple multiplication facts when trying to learn algebra or even just long division is brutal for kids with any attention difficulty whatsoever. By the time they’ve solved the multiplication answer they wanted, they’ve lost the thread on the new concept. Rote memorization reduces the effort needed to use multiplication when learning everything else. It doesn’t feel that you’re reading very carefully here, but it could be me who failed to make myself plain.
I myself am a process guy and high on pattern-seeking. I write software for a living and live in abstractions layered on abstractions - even the physics is invisible lol, nothing (but fans and I guess HDD heads where still used) ever moves. It all feels like pretend!
My point is that understanding processes and relationships in the space of numbers can arise FROM being forced to learn many small truths over and over. A student can identify patterns (the shortcuts) from just learning the facts. Similarly you can get to the facts if you understand the process - like most math there’s a lovely symmetry there that you seem unwilling to agree with me about. They both inform and train the brain differently and you seem to have benefitted from that yourself.
We need both, and rote memorization is especially useful in a small number of domains, irreplaceable. Anyone who has gone through an Anatomy & Physiology class successfully will agree too, and I can give more examples. There’s no “process” or rules involved.
Anyway, I think we’re mostly talking past each other and probably mostly agree.
Never learned them. Can do basic math in my head except hard division, and can’t really do it on paper either. Sucks but has t hurt me one bit in the real world. If it’s applied math im fine with it.
but hard way = better is definitely not some universal principal we should be applying to education.
That’s not what’s happening here though. You don’t learn how to craft a well thought out and organized argument by just copy/pasting from ChatGPT. And that is a skill that 100% translates to the real world.
That’s why my first and third paragraphs criticized AI specifically.
It’s lemmy. You’re not allowed to so much as ponder whether AI is useful for any task whatsoever.
I take your point but multiplication is a really bad example. It’s one of the few things in life where really doing the rote memorization well, once, pays off lifelong. It can be argued “doesn’t pay off lifelong for everyone!”, and I mean, strictly speaking that’s true.
But not learning multiplication properly is basically a death sentence for keeping up with later math classes, which is exactly what convinces a kid they are “bad at math” and shouldn’t pursue entire areas of the working world, generally very rewarding areas, too.
My daughter is not naturally strong at math and I am naturally not authoritarian, but this is one case where being forced to do the work properly one good time (as in learn it truly well, once) is too valuable to let slip.
I’d say the ability to do basic arithmetic in your head is a lifelong boon for anyone.
At Lowe’s we would load bags of mulch. Guy pulls up with a pickup and an order for 30, “OK, we’re going to do 6 stacks of 5.” Motherfuckers, customers and coworkers, would fuck it up every time. Need 72 bricks? 9 stacks of 6. Nope! Idiots would count every brick.
When I ran a reprographics shop I found myself embarrassed that I couldn’t automatically total a few items, so I practiced until I could. The scion of the local big-time contractor came in and I figured his invoice in my head. He saw me pause for two seconds, “Dude. Why don’t you just use a calculator.” “Faster to do it in my head.” “Yeah, but a calculator doesn’t make mistakes.” “I don’t either. It’s only adding a couple of small numbers.” He walked away shaking his head at my foolishness.
Completely agree with you. But hilariously, 9 stacks of 6 bricks only accounts for 54 of them…please don’t change it lmao
FUCK IT. IT STAYS.
You’re a real one!
Need 72 bricks? 9 stacks of 6.
“Yeah, but a calculator doesn’t make mistakes.” "I don’t either
I kind of agree with that guy. I don’t trust John Doe to do math in his head when I’m paying the math. I’d rather some guy I don’t know use a calculator.
We knew each other well. I knew almost every customer that walked in the door.
Second, the mistake will remain.
Telling your robot butler to do your homework for you isn’t how you get an education.
I’m all for using tools to make your life easier, but there’s nothing educational about describing your assignment to someone else, having them do it, and turning in what they give you…
Using AI is closer to that than the “You won’t always have a calculator!1111” example
Did you not read my 1st and 3rd paragraphs?
The dumbing of human beings as a result of AI is a foregone conclusion. It is said that nature cannot regress on its own, but AI is not natural. And therefore, there is no future in which through AI, we achieve anything more than our own end.
I am here to call out the natural/unnatural fallocy. It is silly. Can you really draw a line between the two (natural vs unnatural) in a way that is logical and still supports your argument?
This isn’t something that falls under the appeal to nature fallacy. You’ll note that I never said humanity is better because it’s natural. In fact, I don’t think I applied any form of gradation to it at all. I simply said that evolutionary science states that nature doesn’t regress. However, I don’t believe that evolutionary science considered that AI would remove common sense and rationality from the process.
So, consider your “natural/unnatural fallacy” un-called out by reason of irrelevance.
Ah fair. I was confused by the language. I thought you were saying broadly that AI was bad because it is unnatural rather than because it is cultural / technological.
I still don’t think you’ve made a good case though. We have lots of tech that had us think less that didn’t lead to the end of humanity. What would make AI special enough to end us? People have felt apocalyptic about a lot of things.
From my perspective the issues aren’t about AI itself. The issue is that a small group of folks control our society and how tech gets used.
What do you mean by “regress”? Is the Mexican tetra un-evolving its eyes not a regression?
That’s considered an adaptation. So, no. It didn’t de-evolve. It adapted to its environment and over time, shed a useless function.
What is gained by having no eyes? Can you answer my question about what it means to regress?
By “regress”, I mean essentially to de-evolve. The opposite of progress. Nature does not allow for backwards evolution. Everything moves towards natural adaptation. Never away from it.
A purely cave dwelling fish doesn’t need sight. So, over time- it will lose its sight in favor or other senses, such as smell or the ability to sense sound waves and motion. Also, eyes can be a disadvantage to them as they no longer need to devote energy to a useless sense.
